Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“The unlucky troll”

It must be frustrating to own (or, depending on how one views the legalities, “own”) a patent on the JPEG photo format technology but then not actually be able to move in to collect royalties from “just about every web site that uses an image”. (Asher Hawkins, Forbes, May 5).

It must be frustrating to own (or, depending on how one views the legalities, “own”) a patent on the JPEG photo format technology but then not actually be able to move in to collect royalties from “just about every web site that uses an image”. (Asher Hawkins, Forbes, May 5).

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4 Comments

  • Something is screwy here. The basic jpeg patent was issued in 1987, was owned by a company called Forgent, and was invalidated in 2006. What is the 1993 patent to which this refers? The date is about right for JFIF compression, but that was developed by a consortium of companies, not two individuals, and is to my knowledge unpatented. It isn’t clear to me what this article is talking about.

  • I think the Forbes article is in reference to US patent 5,253,341, ‘Remote query communication system’, granted October 12, 1993. Not JPEG per se, but a general claim to query-based retrieval and client side decompression of ‘audio/visual data’. Which seems strange, because Compuserve was offering compressed image downloads since the mid ’80s. And it seems unclear as to why ‘audio/visual data’ should be treated as a special case of data in general, which tends to be auditory or visual if it is to be used by a person!

    • By meanon

  • This patent: “US patent 5,253,341, ‘Remote query communication system’, granted October 12, 1993” is one of those software patents where if you walked up to any random software engineer and showed it to him, the response would be “Duh!, how else would you do that” and so fails the non-obvious test. Besides, every NASA dead space probe from Mariner one has use that technique to transmit back pictures, so it probably fails prior art as well.

  • Meanon,

    “And it seems unclear as to why ‘audio/visual data’ should be treated as a special case of data in general, which tends to be auditory or visual if it is to be used by a person!”

    I agree. Aren’t ASCII and Unicode, when combined with a font dictionary really just byte compressions of the character glyphs?

    • By OBQuiet